Always On

Road testing the Galaxy S4

The S4 is packed with features, but should you buy it? Three techie testers try out the popular Samsung Galaxy S4 to see if features like hand-gesturing, eye-scrolling, and a built-in translator app are worth the upgrade.

6:18 / May 28, 2013

Transcript

Time for our road test of the Galaxy S4.
It's your basic tricked out smartphone but it does have kind of a couple novelty features that we are looking forward to getting the opinions on from our real world testers.
We have Mossimo, Crystal and Kyle.
Now, each of you are gonna get this phone for a couple of days.
I really want you to dig into it.
Put your e-mail in there, it's okay, we'll check it out.
Now, as you guys use this phone, I want you to focus mainly on
design features and usability.
Just try to evaluate those 3 categories as well as you can.
-I'm Kyle Itani, Executive Chef/Owner of Hopscotch in Oakland and I'm really excited to see how the Galaxy S3 compares to the S4.
-Hi.
I'm Crystal Silva, the art director here at Big Fish and I like [unk] caterpillars in my free time.
-I'm Massimo Prioreschi, VP of Sales and Marketing at Backroads.
And this S4 test is gonna give me street credit with my teams.
My God, it's super, super, super light.
This phone in my pocket for a pair of pants that are like this is fine.
It's totally perfect, you don't even know it's there.
It's so light.
It's really easy to get to the battery and get another battery in there if you wanted to carry a replacement.
It also has a micro SD slot right here.
So, if you needed extra memory, easy to put that in as well.
-[unk].
The screen itself given the size and the resolution is beautiful.
I played some of our hidden object games on them and graphics are meant for tablet size
screen and so everything looks amazing on here.
The screen makes it awesome but the actual hardware itself proved to be a problem.
The position of the power button here, if I'm holding it like this, my thumb would cover and hit this back button which kept pausing the game.
I was getting really frustrated.
-I like the size of the screen face and the color, the resolution is really impressive that plastic material, I've heard some people wonder about that.
I mean, we had her for a few days.
I don't know how durable it would be over the long haul 'cause sometimes,
things get made to run and they'll get in a little bit.
-How many times we'll be doing it?
I was surprised by the eye tracking feature.
I like it.
So, looking at the screen and I look away for whatever reason and it pause which is awesome and I look back and in starts right up.
So, it's useful for-- if I'm actually talking to somebody, but if I intentionally wanna pause it, I just-- that shift doesn't cause it to happen.
That shift does.
So, there is a spectrum that I have to make sure I turn my head enough to initiate that.
I like this.
It is actually really awesome.
-[foreign language].
There it is.
And we could just pop that into a text and away we go.
The phone has this really awesome translate feature, totally picked up my Italian, translated it into English but if you just wanted to use this feature just so that it picks up different languages and you can use them for texting, you can just go and grab this
piece of text and drop it into a text.
Camera has a higher mexapixel than the S3.
It also has a burst mode function where I can take multiple pictures at once and then just choose the best one for later.
So then I can just toggle between each photo and see, you know, what is-- and focus the best.
I wanna go with that one and I'll just save it.
-Power button.
It is pretty smooth to be doing video capture and be able to have the controls not stutter very much.
You'd expect a lot of jitter
when it zoomed in on video and there wasn't a whole lot of jitter.
That's pretty good.
-I really love the mapping feature.
I mean, it's a Google Map, so that's fantastic, very accurate.
You can get by [unk] on it which is great.
The only thing I didn't like was the advertising on it.
It seemed to take up a lot of the screen, so that was kind of annoying but other than that, it worked totally fine.
Hey, good morning, guys.
-Hi.
-Good morning.
-Good morning, Chef.
-Hey, make sure you check the Google document from last night.
The Google Docs are great,
you know, that I downloaded the drive up very fast and then I just have all my documents right there on me at all time throughout the day and I can just go from one document to the next and make sure that, you know, every cook knows what we're doing for the day and it keeps things really organized.
-Up here, when you're wearing it for working out at the gym let's say, it's really, really huge.
So, you'd have to wear down here and at least with the software that I'm using, you wanna look at it, so you'd be doing kinda this.
So, it doesn't really work for me.
-Oh, you're playing [unk] too.
We have a lot devices
here that we designed for Android and iOS an so we constantly, as developers have to be testing their own games.
The operating system took a little getting used to coming from iOS, considering I like a lot of Google products.
It felt like that.
And so, all that was really straightforward.
-Time to find out what our testers got of their time with the S4.
All right.
Let's start with you, Massimo.
What was your overall impression of this call?
-Yeah, I love the size and I love to how light it was compared to the phone
that I have right now.
It's a little difficult to navigate but I give it oen thumb up and one over here.
-Okay.
Crystal, how about you?
-The feel of it was really great.
I was surprised that it's gonna be plastic and the resolution of the screen may aim to look beautiful but it's just too big for someone size-- pocket-sized typically have.
-Okay, interesting.
All right.
And then Kyle, you were out potential upgrader.
How did it [unk] with you?
-I liked it a lot compared to the S3.
Shape, the screen resolution, it's all in upgrade.
I don't know if I had really like just go out and get it now,
maybe wait to renew and then you know, get the discount hunted or something but yeah, it was good.
-All right.
So, give me your total breakdown.
Buy or not buy?
-Not buy.
-Not buy right now until the upgrade, until the discount.
-Yeah, yeah.
-Okay.
-Crystal, what about you?
-Not for myself but maybe for my husband.
-Okay, it's a good gift.
All right.
Massimo, how about you?
-Yeah, not for me either in terms of size.
I would go maybe if my eyes get any worse, I would buy it.
But for now I'm sticking with what I've got.
-So, that's only to show
with how tough the smartphone market is right now that the S4 is definitely a premium phone but if you don't have a reason to upgrade, or a reason to switch from iPhone or a reason to go bigger, it's just gonna sit there on the shelves.
We'll keep watching.
Good luck, S4.

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